Magazine's "Fight" Theme Features Gut-Punching Work

In operation since 1957 and published quarterly by Fairleigh Dickinson University, The Literary Review’s Winter 2016 “Fight” issue claims on its cover to “let words cut, build fortresses from language, forge armor with every line.” This claim largely pans out, with prose and poetry that display an economy of words as well as a commitment to rendering the complexities of human hardship without verging into cloying or overly-sentimental territory.

Right from the start we’re given a view into the ways in which black bodies are violated in this country with Ruth Ellen Kocher’s “#106LinesOnBlacknessForWhitePoetsAndPolicemen,” where I was stunned by lines like, “The first person to call me nigger beat the hell out of me when I was 6 / Until someone beat the hell out of me, I’d never heard the word nigger / After I heard the word nigger, I tried to push my little sister out of a window.”

This gutpunch of a poem is followed up by Christine Sneed’s “The Junk Drawer,” a story that centers around the line, “These are wishes, and as such, are not all meant to come true.” Sneed weaves a story of marital instability in a tactful way, her husband and wife returning to a messy drawer in the house again and again, arguing over its contents, the only things inside the drawer either dead or unused.

The heavy tone continues in Tanya Jacob Knox’s “Work Week for Baby Joe,” where baby’s father Jack Flanagan deals (or doesn’t deal) with the severe injury of his son after a car accident, Knox playing with the ways in which we gain control over unfathomable situations, in this case with an affair.

The somber tone lifts, if only a bit, with Dan Bevacqua’s “The Human Variable,” which features a character known as SELF MADE who has those words tattooed over his eyebrows, his monosyllabic response to one of the characters he meets at a gas station in the middle of the night not even a word, “as if he was offended by language, as if it had done something horrible to him as a child.”

On the subject of language, there’s a certain musicality on display in this issue, as can be found in John Kinsella’s “Golden Gloves,” where you can almost hear the crumple of a car’s chassis against guardrail, almost see the two drivers as they emerge from their cars in the snow, closing in on one another. Through a clever use of time and location swapping, the story stays fresh throughout.

This fighting motif continues with stories like Anthony Tognazzini’s “The Freelance Mariachi,” albeit in a more playful way. I especially enjoyed the brutal linguistic warfare that went on between our mariachi protagonist and an aptly named Doña Maria as they sparred over everything from the mariachi’s financial straits to the unavailability of the Doña’s daughter, for whom the mariachi pines.

I also loved some of the more informal prose that came later in the issue, like in Colin Fleming’s “Red Sweatpants,” where we’re given great lines like, “And a number of his buildings are near an area I thought maybe I’d be all heroic and try to get back, where there’s a hospital I ended up in when I couldn’t stop coughing up blood because my life had come apart and my wife made like a ghost and left without ever saying why.”

For me, the centerpiece of this issue was Richard Reiss’s “Arizona,” a heartbreaking memoir that details Reiss’s struggles to keep his son off drugs and away from a life of violence. His son’s recovery is desperately uplifting, and it’s all delivered in prose that has an aching attention to detail, all of it optimistic and hopeful without once becoming cloying. If there was ever an example of what The New Sincerity is capable of, this story is it.

After having your heart twisted in your chest, about the same is done with your mind in Stephen-Paul Martin’s “Extraordinary Subjective States,” a story of synchronicity and profound confusion with a humorous/philosophical bent, with characters that seem to have no connection eventually coming together to form a cohesive whole, like the WWI researcher who inadvertently ends up with the man who forced her sometimes boyfriend to strip down in the middle of the street before shooting him in both feet. Some readers might be put off a bit by the magic realist ending, where a mysterious individual in an orange jumpsuit comes bearing an envelope that literally has no inside, but I thought it was the perfect ending to the kind of story that Charlie Kaufman or Haruki Murakami would write.

The stories in this journal were fairly conventional, with the odd experimental flair here and there. The poetry broke up this conventionalism very well, with verses that took a lot of chances and covered heavy themes without being heavy handed. I was impressed by the level of diversity on display, and while most of the pieces were excellent, there were more than a few that didn’t quite do it for me, keeping this review just shy of five stars. This journal is a good choice for those writers who like a little magic realism in their writing, who have a solid handle on mastery of tone. On the whole, these words do cut, and these stories do stand their ground.